January 2010

Here’s the stuff I’ve been reading this month.

Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks (nonfiction)
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (from Chera)
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (Christmas book)
Favorite Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton (more Chesterton)
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (Christmas book)
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (Holmes)
The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (more Holmes)
That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis (third in the Space Trilogy)
A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges (from Collected Fictions)
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth (from Chera)
Sabriel by Garth Nix (a reread)
The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley (Christmas book)
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (this month’s funniest read)
The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa (for fun)
This Is Not the Way We Came In by Daryl Scroggins (by a professor I know)
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (for Modern British Fiction)
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (for Form and Theory)

Good heavens, what a month of books! I read almost a book a day during the first week of the year, but this past week I’ve only been able to finish two, so that will be a measure of how many books I should expect to read in February. Probably all of them will say “for class” in parentheses after the author.

My favorite book was The Book of Chameleons, followed closely by a tie with A Study in Scarlet and Juliet, Naked, and my least favortites were The Little Disturbances of Man and Lord Jim, the former because for the first half of each story it was unclear who was talking to whom and why, and the latter because of the long sentences which required mental diagramming for comprehension.

As usual, I will write reviews upon request.

Geerbten

What does this word mean?

I encountered it in a sentence around these other words: “The old, [geerbten] and the modern furniture.” From the surface, I deduced that geerbten is a synonym of old and an antonym of modern, that it is an adjective, and that it can describe furniture. However, geerbten is not in the dictionary.

Fine, says I. Disregarding the adjective ending -en, the word geerbt looks like a past participle, which means that I would need to find the root word in order to look it up. To find the infinitive, if the word follows the regular patterns, I must remove the prefix ge- and the ending -t, and replace the original infinitive ending -en. Now I have the word erben.

Happily, erben is in the dictionary, and it means “to inherit”; and the noun “Erbe,” I learn, can mean both inheritance and heir. From here I must reconstruct the word, backwards. “To inherit” becomes the past participle form of the verb “[have] inherited,” which becomes the adjective “inherited.” It works logically and etymologically.

The old, inherited and the modern furniture stand together with a feeling for style.

The satisfaction of solving the translation puzzle is not quite enough to counter the loss of ten minutes of my morning. I will rejoice when I am living on the other side of this exam.

I Want This

The Book of Eli

If you like great acting, great writing, and great cinematography, you need to see The Book of Eli.

It has a twist, it has a tragedy, it has hope. It’s one of my new favorite movies.

The plot goes like this. Denzel Washington has a book. People want it. He doesn’t want to give it to them.

The Book of Eli also constitutes one of the best treatments of religion I’ve ever seen from a film.

Here’s the official trailer if you need additional persuading.

Are you buying your movie ticket? Buy your movie ticket. It’s worth it.

Deutsch

I wish someone had told me, as a second semester sophomore, that I ought to have taken German IV. Because the graduate school I now attend requires two full years of a college-level foreign language, which I don’t have. So either I have to take German IV, five years later, or I have to pass a translation exam.

The translation exam is 400-500 words long. I will have two (or, according to some documents, three) hours. I may supply my own dictionary or dictionaries. It is pass/fail. The test is offered once a semester, in this case on February 25.

So for the next few weeks I will be spending about an hour a day on my German. I’ve already supplied myself with an easy textbook to bolster my courage, an intermediate textbook to deflate it, and a book on German verbs. I am about to run by the bookstore for the Oxford German Dictionary, and I have already begun the search for my Langenscheidt dictionary (however, of which I begin to despair). In addition to translating from my intermediate textbook, I will be working on a children’s novel, German Wikipedia articles, and, perhaps, a bit of Kafka or the Grimm brothers.

Note to self: I don’t have to be fluent, or even proficient. I only have to pass.

An Ode to Breakfast

I remember reading in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, a series that has been on my Reread Immediately list for quite some time, that breakfast is the least-frequently-written meal in literary history, lunch and tea being more popular and dinner most of all. Therefore whenever I eat or write breakfast, or read for breakfast, I feel somehow proud of myself a) for rising in enough time to make breakfast viable and b) going against the grain, so to speak, by championing a less noticeable meal. And why shouldn’t my characters eat breakfast? I do.

Breakfast this morning for myself included a cocktail of decongestants in orange juice. Orange juice does not usually feature on my breakfast menu, but as I am trying to fortify my immune system against the cold that keeps me teetering on the edge of miserable, I have added eight ounces to my daily regimen. Also it has calcium and Vitamin D, and since I haven’t left the apartment since Sunday, I know I can use the latter.

Usually to drink I will make myself a cup of Scottish breakfast tea or PG Tips with Splenda and skim milk. Tea tastes fifty times better with real sugar than with Splenda, but I can’t afford the calories, since I can drink three to five cups of tea a day. This morning it was Scottish breakfast.

I also enjoy eating yogurt with my breakfast, usually a couple spoons-ful dipped out of the tub while the water for my tea is heating. I’ll buy a reasonably healthy vanilla yogurt in a big container and whittle away at it until the Best By date has passed. Lately, though, I’ve been buying the small cartons of yogurt in different flavors; not nearly as cost-effective nor long-lasting, but sometimes I just can’t say no to banana strawberry, my favorite flavor, which I ate this morning.

The staple of my breakfast, that part of the breakfast which I could eat alone and still consider myself to have dined well, is the oatmeal. I am not a gourmet when it comes to oatmeal: I take mine in microwavable packets with water, not milk. There is, however, a science to adding the right amount of water to the packet contents, so that after microwaving for a minute and thirty seconds, it will come out just right. Whether this perfect amount of water–never measured, always eyeballed–actually reaches the bowl depends heavily on whether I’m wearing my contacts or not. Many’s the time I’ve had to microwave for two, for two and a half minutes, to evaporate the excess water. On those occasions, the oatmeal doesn’t taste quite the same, but I eat it anyway. This morning, happily, I was wearing glasses, so my oatmeal was a success.

I also regularly read for breakfast. I take breakfast at my desk, so natural reading material is gmail and google reader, and if things are slow, facebook statuses. Yesterday I read C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, a book that has been on my Reread Immediately list longer than Thursday Next. Today I wrote and read email, blogs, facebook, and this blog post as a Lewis appetizer. I hope to finish it today.

As I was eating breakfast this morning, I contemplated the story I am writing to see whether I could feature breakfast in it. But alas, my characters are working themselves up to a bread riot, so they get up with no breakfast, go to bed with no dinner, and eat a meager lunch provided them at work. Sorry, characters. The best you get for breakfast is dreams.

Title

Will the real couch potato please stand up? No? Well, can you at least wave the remote control?

Me: Hello, everyone.

Let’s recap the films I’ve watched in the last two days in order to calculate the Minimum Duration of Sofa Residence. (Two is arbitrary; I can’t remember what I watched three days ago.)

A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Season Four, two episodes, 60 mins.
Virtuosity, 106 mins.
Battlestar Galactica Miniseries Pilot, 180 mins.
Battlestar Galactica, “33,” 43 mins.
Mythbusters, Ninja Episode, 43 mins.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), 97 mins.
State of Play, 127 mins.

Total: 486 mins., or eight hours and six minutes.

The sad thing is that I don’t even have the energy to feel ashamed. I think I’ll watch some Pinky and the Brain instead.